BioShock: Ken Levine Talks First-Person Shooters

Why is it an FPS? BioShock's lead designer counts the ways.

Leading into the Tokyo Game Show in the upcoming week, IGN was able to speak with Ken Levine, the creative director of the always compelling and interesting Irrational Games. Irrational mostly has worked on PC games in the past, but its new title, BioShock, is slated for PC and Xbox 360 for sometime in 2007. It will make an appearance at X06 in Barcelona in late September where Levine will reveal a totally new gameplay demo. We spoke with Levine over the phone about first-person shooters. BioShock is a game that's hard to define because it's more than just a first person shooter, and the man behind the game brought a series of interesting insights into why this game could very well be the next step in the genre.

IGN: Let's start this way: Tell me about BioShock. You know way more than I do about it, and from what I can tell it's a first-person role-playing game, but you've made it clear recently that it's a first-person shooter. By the way, I noticed in the most recent screenshots, you've started showing guns in the pictures and people actually being shot.

Ken Levine: The core thing is that we came back from E3 and we sort of got a lot of feedback on the game: "Oh! It's a RPG, it's an adventure game. It's a dessert topping." And you know, that's a problem. When you try to innovate you get that. When people see something new they don't know what to make out of it. But our goal with BioShock is really to make people re-consider, re-imagine, and redefine what a first-person shooter can be. It's like those first experiences you had when you first played Gran Turismo. In previous games you could choose a course and a few cars. GT broadened the definition of what a racing game could be. And now, when you play a racing game and it doesn't have the features that GT brought into the act? You know, the abilities to tune your car, get new equipment, and make it look cool, well it doesn't feel like a complete racing game anymore. It changed the audience's expectations of a racing game. GTA is like that for action games. It's hard to go back to simpler games after having played it. And I think that first-person shooters haven't evolved since Half-Life. That was sort of the last evolution in the genre. We went from non-narrative corridor shooters to a story experience with Half-Life, and they expanded that in Half-Life 2. We've watched others genres evolve and change, even explode, and the shooter genre has really remained static, and our goal with BioShock is to advance the dialog and advance the genre.


IGN: OK, roughly, is the first-person shooter genre was originally defined by Castle Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom and soon after by Quake and Unreal, and Half-Life introduced an immersive storyline and a universe, you don't think there are any other games in the genre that have pushed it forward? I mean, what about Deus Ex?

Ken Levine: Well, with System Shock and Deus Ex, people didn't think of them as first-person shooters. The primary reason is because they didn't compete visually. And I know, for instance, with System Shock 2, we didn't even try to compete in the FPS space because it didn't have, well, we didn't have any more, so we didn't have an engine to compete. We didn't have the Unreal engine. We basically said, "Let's not even fight the shooter battle. Let's make this game that feels like an RPG." I think Deus Ex was in a very similar place. The bar of entr¿e with a great shooter is that it has to look gorgeous. That's the basic bar of entr¿e. If it doesn't look gorgeous, people aren't really going to play your shooter. It's not the case in turn-based strategy games, in platformers…

This may be controversial, but because the games haven't been particularly innovative, the looks of FPS games have become more important. If you look at Doom 3, for instance, in what way did Doom 3 innovate? It innovated in one way. It innovated visually. That was the one thing. It brought normal maps, real-time shadows, real-time lighting, and that was the place they decided to innovate. Compare that to GTA, which certainly didn't innovate graphically, it innovated from a gameplay perspective. Their technology choice is streaming, and graphically it was behind the times, and Sony was pretty down on the product before their shipped. But, the great thing about BioShock is that we have our new sugar daddy, at Take-Two, and we have the resources to innovate in both places, graphics and gameplay. My goal is to make shooters innovate in places besides graphics. We have to, but that's not that you can't innovate in graphics. But one thing we got from E3, I feel pretty comfortable that we are innovating in that area, both from a technology standpoint, you know including the water and from an aesthetic standpoint, from the look of Rapture…

IGN: You said in both areas BioShock is innovating, in graphics and gameplay…

Ken Levine: And gameplay wise we're innovating. That's one more place we're innovating than shooters usually do. That's why Half-Life is still so striking because it innovated in gameplay as well as graphics. But it wasn't that far ahead graphically. It was up to snuff graphically with its compatriots. But since then it's pretty much been graphics that have innovated in the genre.

IGN: How would you say BioShock is innovating gameplay in the first-person shooter genre?

Ken Levine: From the core experience, it's creating a world that allows the player to express himself in a huge range of ways; from a weapons perspective to a world interaction expression and what he can do in the world. Whether it's shooting or using his genetic powers, to hacking into machines and crafting items, to taking over security systems. The world is very responsive to what the player does. You can see the little sisters and big daddies in action, and they are these dynamically generated actors that go about their business and do their thing. And the player has a huge ability not to just observe and interact with them, but to change the way they interact with the world and the environment. You saw a little bit of that at e3, and you'll see more of that at X06. The player has tools to change the dynamics of the world. There are two components to that, one is to create those tools, and the other is to make the world listen to those tools and behave consistently and interestingly with those tools. Out of those tools, and the broad range of expression and sensitivity the world has -- that's where emergence comes out of.


In This Article

BioShock Image


Developers2K Boston
Publishers2K Games, Feral Interactive
Release DateAugust 21, 2007
PlatformsXbox 360, PC, PlayStation 3, Macintosh, iPhone